The Government of the Canary Islands, in representation of José Antonio Valbuena, Minister of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning, took part this week in the Spanish International Conference on Renewable Energy (SPIREC 2013) to present the details of the Canary Islands Energy Transition Plan (PTECan) and the eight strategies that it comprises.
Valbuena’s intervention took place during the side event ‘Towards an Efficient Energy Transition in the Islands’, in which representatives of the Government of the Balearic Islands and the Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE) also took part.
Valbuena explained that during this legislature a great effort has been made, not only in the processing of new renewable sources, but also in terms of energy planning in order to design the path that will lead the Canary Islands to the full decarbonisation of its economy by 2040.
“We are aware that this is an ambitious objective, but only in this way can we achieve major environmental and sustainable goals for a territory that has all the necessary elements to avoid the current dependence on fossil fuels and move towards a more environmentally friendly future,” said the minister.
“In these four years, the penetration of renewables has progressed from 16% in 2019 to over 20% in 2022 and, in the near future, we will be able to announce that the Canary Islands have reached the milestone of one gigawatt of renewable power in 2023,” continued Valbuena.
Finally, among other aspects, the regional representative recalled that the Canary Islands are currently at the head of national energy poverty, a circumstance that we must reverse as quickly as possible by relying on public subsidies for the democratisation of energy, greater flexibility in our electricity systems to promote the penetration of renewables and an exponential growth of modalities such as photovoltaic self-consumption and energy communities.
